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Thursday 6 February

Tomasz Tatarczyk: The Philosopher of Depths

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Tomasz Tatarczyk (1947-2010) was not one of those who paraded around exhibition openings with a lukewarm glass of champagne in hand. No, this Polish artist was one of those who wade knee-deep in mud to hunt for truth. After wasting his time in the sanitized corridors of the Warsaw University of Technology (1966-1972), he finally found his calling at the Academy of Fine Arts (1976-1981), under the mentorship of Jan Tarasin. And believe me, it wasn’t to please his mother.

What I love about Tatarczyk is that he turned the banal into an existential battle. Take his Piles from 1986—yes, literally piles of branches. While some raved about pretentious video installations featuring hamsters on wheels (a subtle metaphor for our consumer society, isn’t it?), he painted pieces of deadwood with the gravity of Matthias Grünewald contemplating his crucifixion. Martin Heidegger would have loved it—being-towards-death embodied in every twig, every piece of bark destined for the fire. But unlike those German philosophers who drown their ideas in 47-kilometer-long sentences, Tatarczyk punches us in the face with his metaphysics.

His Black Dogs series is even more revealing. His faithful companion Cygan, paddling through the murky waters of the Vistula, becomes a modern Sisyphus on four legs. You know, like in Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, except here our absurd hero has a wagging tail. The way Tatarczyk captures these moments—a black dog on a white background, struggling against the current—is as if Samuel Beckett had decided to paint instead of write plays. Waiting for Rover, if you will.

In 1984, Tatarczyk settled in Męćmierz, a village three kilometers from Kazimierz on the Vistula. Not exactly Saint-Germain-des-Prés, if you catch my drift. It was there that he began his great obsession with closed doors, roads leading nowhere, and hills hiding the horizon. Like Friedrich Nietzsche exiling himself to Sils-Maria to contemplate eternal return, Tatarczyk found in his voluntary isolation a truth that air-conditioned galleries could never contain.

His monochrome paintings—and when I say monochrome, I don’t mean those white canvases that some collectors buy at exorbitant prices to prove their “sophistication”. No, Tatarczyk’s blacks and whites are alive, vibrant, as if Kazimir Malevich had decided to step out of his square and take a stroll in real life. Dorota Monkiewicz perfectly described his work as a “microcosm of colored particles”. That’s exactly it—every square inch of his canvases contains more nuance than some exhibitions I’ve seen last month.

Take his landscapes, for example. Those winding roads disappearing into darkness, those hills that seem to have been drawn by a Zen monk on acid—it’s not just landscape painting. It’s pure ontology, as Martin Heidegger might say if he weren’t too busy writing incomprehensible sentences. Tatarczyk shows us what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called the “flesh of the world”—that mysterious interface between the visible and the invisible. Except instead of drowning us in philosophical jargon, he shows it with three brushstrokes and a masterful use of black.

And let’s talk about those closed doors he obsessively painted. You don’t need to be Jacques Lacan to grasp the symbolism—but what’s fascinating is how Tatarczyk turns these everyday barriers into monuments to the unattainable. It’s as if Albert Camus and Franz Kafka had collaborated on a series of paintings, except Tatarczyk manages to be even more existential than them without writing a single line.

Critics love to talk about his “pictorial asceticism”. What a joke. It’s not asceticism; it’s surgical precision. Each painting is like a Werner Heisenberg equation—the closer you look, the more you realize uncertainty is an integral part of the work. These seemingly simple landscapes are actually philosophical treatises disguised as paintings.

In 2008, he received the Jan Cybis Prize. Too late, if you ask me. He should have received it twenty years earlier when he was exhibiting those revolutionary Piles at the Foksal Gallery. But that’s typical—we only recognize our true visionaries when they’re too tired to dance at their own party.

His work with the Kościuszko Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation in Italy only confirmed what we already knew—Tatarczyk was a global artist trapped in a local context. But unlike so many others who would sell their souls for a Chelsea exhibition, he stayed true to his vision. He kept painting his black dogs, his dark hills, and his mysterious paths until his death in 2010.

The real tragedy isn’t his death—we all die someday, as his piles of wood so elegantly remind us. No, the tragedy is that we still have so many pseudo-artists producing soulless work while geniuses like Tatarczyk have to fight for recognition. His works are now in the collections of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Łódź Museum of Art, but how long did it take? How many gallery owners looked at his monumental paintings wondering if they’d look good above some collector’s couch?

Tatarczyk showed us that true radicalism in art isn’t about shocking or provoking but about looking at the world with relentless honesty. His paintings are like Zen koans—the more you look at them, the more they look back at you. And believe me, it’s not comfortable. But art isn’t supposed to be comfortable. Art is supposed to shake you, wake you up, and make you see the world differently. And if all you see is a black dog in water or a pile of wood when you look at a Tatarczyk, then maybe you should go back to your decorative posters.

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